 Our next speaker is Margarine Bacala of Mothers Act Criminal Justice Reform. Hi. First of all, I want to thank everyone who was involved in including me on this panel. I'm very grateful to be here. Mothers Act for Criminal Justice Reforms was born out of my desperation and isolation that I experienced when my son was being sucked into the school to prison pipeline. It began in middle school, sixth grade, until when these schools were very nurturing of him. But middle school, everything changed. And just from a background, like any Mothers, my son is a person of color. And like many Mothers, I have a son that was traumatized as a very small child. And if you look at our prison population, that includes the majority of people who are there. People who are colored and people who have been traumatized. And also people who use substances as a result of their trauma and their ostracization. I went through, with my son, I went through his expulsion and so through criminal hearings for truancy because he wouldn't go to school. I went through tons of teachers' meetings trying to figure out what was wrong with him. And, you know, gradually he became totally disenfranchised. He didn't want to go to any of the schools. So then he was out on the street doing things that the other people, other kids who were out on the street were doing, and getting in trouble. So he really did follow the whole prison, school to prison process. He's incarcerated right now. His crime against the country is possession of four grams of substance. And our government thinks he should use it, so it makes him feel a lot better when he uses it. Anyway, so I know that there are 2.3 million people incarcerated in our country. That means there are at least 2.3 million mothers. And there are fathers, and there are other relatives who are at the same loss that I was experiencing. And so my purpose was to be there for people who needed an organization or people to turn to when they didn't know where else to turn. And it's been very rewarding and gratifying to be able to reach a hand out. I don't know that we've changed the incarceration at all, but I'd like to think that we've helped change some people's lives for the better. So in inner cities, you had high unemployment, no sign of opportunities, and hopelessness. And there were drugs, and that was a good way to make some money. So you have unemployment, and you have drugs. And so all of a sudden, the war on drugs and incarceration start ramping up. And the result of that was it got a whole lot of unemployed people off the streets. And it also, at the same time, provided jobs for rural communities, all these prisons. Do you know how many prisons there are in Texas? 909. 109 prisons. So, you know, caging people provides jobs for some of the, it lowers the unemployment rate, right? And it provides jobs for people who want that kind of work. I mean, it's just, to me, it's horrifying. At the same time, the state government or the government was cutting funding for education and increasing funding for prisons. This was intentional. And in Texas, an ACLU report that I read recently said that we spend seven times more on the prisons than we do on higher education. It's an effort. Yeah, it's a sustained systemic effort to keep this in place. And there are people, I know that Senator Menendez, somebody from his office is here tonight, I know that he's working. He genuinely wants to get this changed. And we have to get these people who want to keep this in place out of office. Who's keeping them there? The sheriff's units, the guards' unions, prosecutors, the whole legal system. And I refuse any more to call it a justice system. I have to change the name of the group. Whether it's after criminal justice reform is not justice. It's criminal legal reform. Because there's no justice in this. But until we get these people out of office, it's going to continue. Excuse me. Another thing is that we have to get trauma-informed care in our schools for our kids instead of discipline and criminalizing them when they misbehave. We need to work with every single group we possibly can in whatever little way we can, whether it's writing a letter, whether it's making a phone call, whether it's sending a tweet, because letter writing campaigns, Twitter campaigns are really effective. So there are lots of things that all of us can do, maybe not working on it full-time, but it's just an action a day or an action a week. We can break this down. Thank you.